The American Psychological Association defines personality as “characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving”. Openness to experience is one of the Big Five Personality Traits and is associated with intellectual curiosity, appreciation of art, sensitivity to inner feelings, and preference for variety. According to personality psychologist Robert McCrae, openness to experience is a broad personality construct that “implies both receptivity to many varieties of experience and a fluid and permeable structure of consciousness”.
Openness to experience is often considered a domain-general trait – that is, people are generally open, closed or somewhere in-between. If openness were a domain-specific trait, a person's openness would vary a lot, depending on the situation. McCrae's description of openness as a "receptivity to many varieties of experience" seems to favor a domain-general conception of the trait, which remains the dominant conception in the literature. As Verhulst, Eaves, and Hatemi (2012) put it, this is an openness that "extends into every facet of a person's life".
In the last post of this series, I expressed doubt that openness could be a domain-general trait because the brain and attentional processes just don't work that way. In brief: you don't get excited neurons without inhibited neurons and you can't focus on one thing without directing attention away from something else. In other words, you can't be open without being closed. But there are other less abstract objections to the dominant conception of openness as a domain-general trait.
One is related to the observation that many openness measures assume that certain values or attitudes are relevant to the trait. For instance, openness scores may be based in part by respondents' responses to items on conservative values, religiosity, traditionalism, and rebelliousness. However, their responses may reflect the consistency of their values more than their general openness. Meaning they're not more or less open in general but simply they hold certain values more or less consistently.
And if a value is assumed in a score, you can't turn around and use the score to predict the same value. Josiah Neeley puts it well in the case of openness and political attitudes:
“…personality psychologists consider political values part of one's personality, and not independent constructs. However, this understanding is often missing in the current literature…political attitudes should be viewed as part and parcel of the same latent construct [of Openness]. From this perspective, when it comes to Openness predicting political attitudes, researchers have been not only comparing apples to apples, but predicting an apple with the same apple.”
Given this inherent bias in personality measures, it's no surprise that conservatives are found to be less open than liberals. But what happens when you try to eliminate this bias? In a series of studies, Conway et al (2016) did just that with dogmatism, a trait associated with low openness (dogmatic people tend to be rather closed-minded).
In these studies, researchers administered two versions of a personality measure: one conservative, one liberal. A conservative version would have questions like “A religious group which tolerates too much difference of opinion among its own members cannot exist for long.” The parallel liberal questionnaire would read “An environmental group which tolerates too much difference of opinion among its own members cannot exist for long.” It should come as no surprise that liberal subjects scored higher on dogmatism if they took the liberal version of the measure and conservative subjects scored higher if they took the conservative one. The basic take-away: people tend to be closed-minded about subjects to which they are ideologically committed and open-minded about other stuff. In other words, dogmatism - and by extension, open-mindedness - appears to a domain-specific trait.
Granted, being more or less open-minded is only part of what it means to be open to experience. Perhaps some types of openness are domain-specific and others domain-general. But, then, should a broad personality construct like openness to experience include types of openness that vary for each person, depending on the specifics of the situation? Shouldn't we clean up the construct?
Next: openness to experience and science (at last!)
*Note that domain-specificity is a matter of degree, having to do with how consistently a trait manifests across diverse contexts.
References:
Conway, L. G., Gornick, L. J., Houck, S. C., Anderson, C., Stockert, J., Sessoms, D. and McCue, K. (2016), Are Conservatives Really More Simple-Minded than Liberals? The Domain Specificity of Complex Thinking. Political Psychology, 37: 777–798. doi:10.1111/pops.12304
McCrae, R. R. (1994), Openness to Experience: Expanding the boundaries of Factor V. Eur. J. Pers., 8: 251–272. doi:10.1002/per.2410080404
Verhulst, B., Eaves, L. J., & Hatemi, P. K. (2012). Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies. American Journal of Political Science, 56(1), 34–51.